Musicology / Wizard City Music Studio

[undone plover]

To start, I love the housing instruments, and the castle magic support has been great for beginning to make compositions. It’s a little clunky to make full songs though, lest you have perfect tempo. I think it would be neat to expand on the musical instruments feature, both within housing but also potentially a more social feature.

I propose we make a Wizard City Music Studio (or alternatively, in the arcanum musicology area). The purpose would be to expand composition tools, where wizards could compose full songs. Essentially, it would be nice to see some way to write sheet music in wiz, being able to change key, tempo, and layer instruments (without having to do some clunky castle magic/playing the instrument to a metronome in real time). Here, you would be able to save drafts of your compositions, plus print music scrolls for a small amount of gold. Additionally, people could post their compositions so other wizards could listen and print music scrolls from other players (player could get something back whenever their scroll is printed perhaps?). Potentially, you could also have a stage where wizards can queue up to perform their compositions in person.

Lastly, I think it could be fun to make instrument wands more interactive. “Instrument Tuning” could be used to create a small tune for when you cast spells with your instrument wand. You could either use a pre-set tune, or create your own (within the confines that KI could set).

It’s probably a lot of work to implement this, but could be a fun way to encourage players to have their sound on. Plus, it could fit within the lore of musicology 🙂

[grave phoenix]

adding onto this, it would be really cool to work with a piano roll in the same way you can with many DAWs and being able to change the tempo after you've put the notes in

[undone plover]

Couple more things I thought I’d add on here that might make composing more feasible for people and hopefully wouldn’t be crazy on the development side of things.

1. Let us change the tempo of pre-set tracks. Would be nice to have some VERY simple percussion tracks for instance that we could just change the tempo, and then we’d be able to layer our melodies + harmonies on top.

2. Let us change the volume of individual instruments. Would help with some track balancing.

3. Let us set a time signature so we can end a song track at the end of the bar. Currently, if you do not stop the track exactly on beat, if you want to loop something it will get out of sync very easily. Would also be nice to have something showing us how many bars we’ve played for a given track.

4. Let us have a way to adjust the octave of an instrument. Would be nice to be able to play higher or lower notes for a given instrument.

5. It would be nice to have some way to record on other instruments while listening to other tracks we’ve made on other instruments.

6. It would also be nice to be able to play multiple tracks from the same instrument. So then I don’t have to have two pianos if I have two piano parts.
   Will also note a potential ongoing bug: right now it is not very feasible to play multiple notes at the same time on an instrument. The recording will only usually play back one of the notes that was played at the same time, meaning to play a chord or a drum beat, you’ll need multiple instruments.

[undone plover]

As I've been doing this more and more lately, I think one simple thing that could be added is a castle magic spell that modifies the speed of a track. I.e. set music loop to 1.5x speed. It's hard to play things at tempo with the current controls, so having a simple modifier would be immensely helpful. I think this would be beneficial as a castle magic addition as opposed to a sliding scale (like advanced movement) since I often use multiple simple tracks for multiple songs, but then edit the tempo in video editors. Similarly, this would allow for the tempo to be modified in the house after the song has been activated with castle magic

One last thing - a few customizable sign messages like "Sound on!" or "Concert today!" or something to generally indicate a music loop is playing would be fun to include for housing tours.